December 27, 2013

In the United States, few ploys are more effective at deflecting media interest from a line of inquiry than to label it a "conspiracy theory." In much of the rest of the world, however, with Istanbul traditionally leading the way, conspiracy theories are cherished as the most plausible way to understand political and legal events. After all, what else are politicians, generals, government officials, religious leaders, business magnates, and journalists paid to do other than to conspire over small cups of strong coffee? And why wouldn't you want to know who is conspiring against whom?

A New York Times op-ed illustrates this American-Turkish gap in worldview: Andrew Finkel, author of “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know," explains in the NYT:

ISTANBUL — A wave of early morning police raids in Turkey on Dec. 17 gave the world a sudden glimpse into the murky inner workings of the country’s ruling elite, pulling back the curtain on astonishing scenes of bribery and graft.

The head of the state-controlled financial giant, Halkbank, had $4.5 million secreted in shoe boxes in his study. Istanbul’s best-known real-estate developer was interrogated over bribes to evade zoning restrictions.

I am shocked, shocked to hear that Istanbul's best-known real-estate developer is under suspicion of paying bribes to evade zoning restrictions, and that high ranking government officials appear to be skimming cash from gigantic construction projects such as the city's new international airport.

In Turkey, however, the locals have a different reaction to the news from these police raids on Turkey's rich and powerful: they want to know who is behind these audacious attacks on the power structure. After all, it takes more than a little bravery to attack a national leader's confidants.

In contrast, Westerners like New York Times' readers are annoyed by Turks' interest in behind-the-scenes machinations. Instead, Turks should just focus on what has been presented to them in the media and not try to figure out why it's suddenly in the media. Speculating about what's going on behind the curtains is downright un-American. Finkel goes on:

...Mr. Erdogan does not know how to play defense. Last weekend, he addressed rally after rally and cursed the “international groups” and “dark alliances” trying to undermine Turkey’s prestige. Newspapers tied to his government named the culprits: Israel and the United States. One pro-Erdogan broadsheet demanded that the American ambassador, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., be declared persona non grata for trying to punish Halkbank for its dealings with Iran.

... Absolute power corrupting absolutely tells only part of the Turkish story. ...

Many commentators have framed the raids as evidence of an escalating row between Mr. Erdogan and the religious preacher Fethullah Gulen, who controls an influential network of adherents from a self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania.

It’s true that the Gulenists were natural allies of the A.K.P. when it first came to power in 2002. Zekeriya Oz, the prosecutor who initiated last week’s investigation, is the same official who launched the Ergenekon trial — a successful criminal action against the top brass for plotting a military coup (he is believed to have Gulen connections).

Ergenekon was a giant conspiracy theory propounded by Erdogan's elected government alleging that out-of-favor Kemalist generals and other lifetime members of the deep state were formulating a giant conspiracy to overthrow the government to prevent the government from conspiring against the deep state out of its fear that the deep state was conspiring against the government and so forth and so on.

To the American mind, this hall of mirrors set of conspiracy theories seems alien -- after all, we've been conditioned by extensive campaigns going back to the Warren Report to never believe in conspiracy theories. But to the Turkish mind, an infinite loop of conspiracy theories seems obvious; moreover, the average American strikes the average Turk as a naive dupe too obtuse to notice how he is being manipulated by powerful interests in America and abroad.

The speculation is that many of those police officers who lost their jobs in the last 10 days had Gulen affiliations. A recent brimstone sermon webcast by Mr. Gulen fueled speculation that new revelations about A.K.P. wrongdoing are in the pipeline.

But blaming the Gulen movement is a bit like blaming Zionists. It’s a sad commentary on contemporary Turkey that people have to reach for conspiracy theories to explain why public officials are doing their job to prosecute corruption.

In contrast, we don't have to reach for conspiracy theories in contemporary America to explain why public officials are doing their job to prosecute corruption in, say, the mortgage mess. Instead, almost nobody gets prosecuted.

... The government is treating the crisis as nothing short of a coup by those jealous of its success.

Similarly, the American government doesn't have to worry about a coup by those envious of its success.

This is nonsense.

The opposition it faces has emerged because of the A.K.P’s own lack of respect for the rule of law and a cynical disregard for public accountability. It can no longer hide behind conspiracy theories and bluster.

December 26, 2013

U. of Pennsylvania psychologist Philip Tetlock has been studying "expert political judgment" for decades. An early finding was that people who are employed to go on TV and make exciting forecasts about the future aren't very accurate. Simple extrapolation models -- things are going to keep on keeping on, only more so -- tend to be a little more accurate than media experts (who, in their defense, are on TV to be interesting -- the notion that the near future is probably going to be a lot like the recent past is just about the definition of Bad TV).

Then he determined that people who are ideological one trick ponies (hedgehogs, to use Isaiah Berlin's terminology) are worse at forecasting than people who have more arrows in their quiver (foxes). (Here are some other Tetlock findings.)

A few years ago Tetlock started the Good Judgment Project in which anybody on the Internet can try their hand at forecasting the upcoming year's events. (It's subsidized by federal spooks at IARPA.)

In the late 1980s one of us (Philip Tetlock) launched such a tournament. It involved 284 economists, political scientists, intelligence analysts and journalists and collected almost 28,000 predictions. The results were startling. The average expert did only slightly better than random guessing. Even more disconcerting, experts with the most inflated views of their own batting averages tended to attract the most media attention. Their more self-effacing colleagues, the ones we should be heeding, often don’t get on to our radar screens.

That project proved to be a pilot for a far more ambitious tournament currently sponsored by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), part of the American intelligence world. Over 5,000 forecasters have made more than 1m forecasts on more than 250 questions, from euro-zone exits to the Syrian civil war. Results are pouring in and they are revealing. We can discover who has better batting averages, not take it on faith; discover which methods of training promote accuracy, not just track the latest gurus and fads; and discover methods of distilling the wisdom of the crowd.

The big surprise has been the support for the unabashedly elitist “super-forecaster” hypothesis. The top 2% of forecasters in Year 1 showed that there is more than luck at play. If it were just luck, the “supers” would regress to the mean: yesterday’s champs would be today’s chumps. But they actually got better. When we randomly assigned “supers” into elite teams, they blew the lid off IARPA’s performance goals. They beat the unweighted average (wisdom-of-overall-crowd) by 65%; beat the best algorithms of four competitor institutions by 35-60%; and beat two prediction markets by 20-35%.

To avoid slipping back to business as usual—believing we know things that we don’t—more tournaments in more fields are needed, and more forecasters. So we invite you, our readers, to join the 2014-15 round of the IARPA tournament. Current questions include: Will America and the EU reach a trade deal? Will Turkey get a new constitution? Will talks on North Korea’s nuclear programme resume? To volunteer, go to the tournament’s website at www.goodjudgmentproject.com. We predict with 80% confidence that at least 70% of you will enjoy it—and we are 90% confident that at least 50% of you will beat our dart-throwing chimps.

One of my readers is a super-forecaster in Tetlock's tournaments, and he writes:

Hi Steve,

I saw your question at WaPo pages from two days ago and, since no one answered and I am not about make an account with them, I thought I'd answer by email. As a regular reader of your blog, it's my pleasure. I am one of the 120 "superforecasters."

Are you allowed to pick and choose which questions to answer?

Yes, you are, but with some limitations:

1. You must answer 1/3 (for regular participants) or 1/2 (for "supers") of all questions in during the season. This year, it's about 150 between August 1 through May 1. If you don't, they drop you and don't pay a laughable (considering the time spent) honorarium of $150 ($250 for those "retained" from past year).

2. You will be scored for all questions no matter what. As the very first solid finding of the project was that teams of 12-15 give better forecasts than individual forecasters (duh!), almost all participants today work in teams. For all questions that you did not forecast (and for all days that you didn't forecast any particular question), your score will be median of the your team's. Team's score is median of individual forecasters.

As Tetlock's team keeps saying, doing well in this weird competition involves more than sheer luck. (I suppose that's their biggest finding to date and they are doing all kinds of silly psychometric tests on us to see what they can correlate it to). Two examples:

- In the first year, I finished high in my "experimental condition" that had over 100 participants. All forecasts were individual in this condition. Top predictors from each group became "supers," others were allowed to keep going as usual. Majority, I imagine, dropped out because it truly takes a lot of time. A few others who were near the top but didn't make it to "supers" did well enough next year to achieve the "super" status. Even if they "competed" within a pool of several thousand.

- Last year, a particular group of "supers" beat everyone in the other groups by a largish margin. Today, this same team still has the best score even if "supers" competition is now among eight groups.

And yes, the "supers" consistently beat everyone else, but I think it has a lot to with self-selection for folks willing to google on regular basis information pertaining to completely weird stuff like this:

Will China seize control of the Second Thomas Shoal before 1 January 2014 if the Philippines structurally reinforces the BRP Sierra Madre beforehand? (The answer is supposed to come as probability and can be updated daily if desired.)

The BRP Sierra Madre is the rusting hulk of a ship that the Filipino navy ran onto a reef in the Spratley Islands in 1999 and has maintained a half-starved platoon in it ever since in an attempt to establish a legal precedent to underwater oil and gas rights in the South China Sea. Very Waterworldy, except with a far smaller budget. (By the way, I had never heard of this ship until two hours ago.)

Now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if a fair amount of competence in this tournament derives from having a sense of just how long it takes for stuff to happen. Since the game looks at typically annual time frames so that it can determine winners and losers in a reasonable amount of time, I bet a lot of losers have a tendency to say, "Yeah, that will probably happen" without estimating how long it could take for it to happen.

For example, say there is a question that asks if the coalition government in Britain or Germany or wherever will come undone. In the long run, the answer is surely Yes. But, will it happen within the next year? Powerful people often are pretty talented at kicking the can down the road for another year.

Even if you read well-informed writers on a particular topic, your reading may bias you toward assuming something is going to happen soon. For example, consider the question of whether the division of the island of Cyprus will last. In the long run, perhaps not. On the other hand, the short run is now four decades old.

If you read articles about the Cyprus situation, the authors have a natural bias to argue that this topic of their expertise is less boring than it sounds because Real Soon Now, something is going to happen, so you should pay attention to what they have to say.

Another trap is that players in the real world are also making the same calculations as you are. For example, say you figure there is a high probability the Chinese will immediately seize control of the Second Thomas Shoal in retaliation if the Filipino government fixes up its rusting hulk. After all, the Filipino's can't afford to stop the Chinese.

But what if the Filipino foreign minister is of the same mind as you about the unstoppability of Chinese retaliation? Perhaps he or she reasons: at present, we can't stop the Chinese from retaliating if we fix up our Waterworld set, so let's not fix it up in 2013. Maybe in 2014 or later we will be able to put together a coalition of powers to deter the Chinese from seizing the Second Thomas Shoal, but we can't do it yet, so let's not cause a confrontation now that we are sure to lose.

Thus, on this question which is conditional upon the Filipinos setting the ball rolling, the only way to win if you think the Chinese would retaliate is for the Filipino government to have worse judgment than you have. You only get credit for getting this question right if the Chinese agree with you and the Filipinos disagree.

As you can imagine, it requires more or less the same mentality as the one demonstrated by those tireless Wikipedia editors.

It's interesting that Tetlock and Co. randomly assigns the best forecasters into all-star teams. I wonder if voluntary teams of stars would be even better. Theoretically, you'd want your team to be made up of different specialists, like a comic book universe superhero squad such as the Avengers or the Justice League, so negotiating the makeup of your own team ought to be best. But perhaps personalities would get in the way?

With so many questions, the role of inside information is likely minimized. I mean, do you know anybody who is a big wheel in Spratley Islands circles? Probably not. And if you do, you probably don't know too many people in the Turkish constitution-writing business.

Yet, much of the traditional role of diplomats was to collect inside information at social gatherings by charming and lulling other diplomats into spilling the beans about their governments' intentions regarding Constantinople.

Of course, with inside information in the financial sphere, there has long been a metaphysical debate over the prime mover exception. In the early 1990, the feds prosecuted Michael Milken for making profitable forecasts about stock prices based on inside information about upcoming takeover bids his stooges were launching. Milken's defenders argued that logically there had to be an exception for the ultimate insider in a takeover bid, and that Milken was obviously the main man, not the nominal corporate raider whom he was financing. An interesting point, but the feds put him in prison for a couple of years, anyway. (That seems like a long time ago.)

I recently read the latest Lawrence of Arabia biography, Lawrence in Arabia, and it seems like T.E. Lawrence for a few years had the knack of prediction when it came to the Middle East: e.g., don't land at Gallipoli, land at Alexandretta (not that we can tell what would have happened in the counterfactual). Of course, to help make some of his predictions come true -- e.g., Prince Feisal looks like a winner -- he would get on his camel and go blow something up in Prince Feisal's name, which participants in the Good Judgment Project are probably discouraged from doing.

Another question would be how big of a g-factor is there in world affairs forecasting. Do people who specialize in southeast Asia outpredict global generalists on the Second Thomas Shoal question? Or to be a global generalist, do you just have to be better overall than the regional specialists?

Consider major league baseball players by way of analogy. Often they have fairly specialized roles in the majors such as closer or utility infielder. Yet in high school, they typically played shortstop or centerfield (when they weren't pitching), and they almost all batted third or cleanup in the lineup. In other words, they were just the best all-around ballplayers on their high school teams. There is a substantial baseball g-factor.

On the other hand, the minor leagues are full of good all-around baseball players who lack the special skill -- a 95 mph fastball rather than a 90 mph one, or 20-13 vision rather than 20-18, or being a plodding 240 pound lefty first baseman rather than a 240 pound righty first baseman -- that would make them useful in the majors.

It's almost tautological that there will be both a g-factor and specific subfactors (such as language knowledge) in international affairs forecasting. The question will be what is the balance and what are the most important subfactors.

Conrad Alvin Barrett, 27, has been charged with a federal hate crime related to a racially-motivated assault of a 79-year-old African American man, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuels of the Civil Rights Division along with U.S. Attorney Kenneth Magidson of the Southern District of Texas and Special Agent in Charge Stephen L. Morris of the FBI.

“Hate crimes tear at the fabric of entire communities,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Samuels. “As always, the Civil Rights Division will work with our federal and state law enforcement partners to ensure that hate crimes are identified and prosecuted, and that justice is done.” ...

Defendant

The complaint charges Barrett, of Katy, Texas, with one count of violating the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. According to the complaint, on Nov. 24, 2013, Barrett attacked the elderly man because of the man’s race and color in what Barrett called a “knockout.” ...

Barrett allegedly recorded himself on his cell phone attacking the man and showed the video to others. The complaint alleges Barrett made several videos, one in which he identifies himself and another in which he makes a racial slur. In addition, Barrett had allegedly been working up the “courage” to play the “knockout game” for approximately a week.

The “knockout game” is an assault in which an assailant aims to knock out an unsuspecting victim with one punch. According to the complaint, the conduct has been called by other names and there have been similar incidents dating as far back as 1992.

According to the complaint, Barrett comments in a video that “the plan is to see if I were to hit a black person, would this be nationally televised?”

Occasionally, I get asked for my predictions for the upcoming year. I usually try to dodge doing that because forecasting the future is hard work and I'd just be embarrassingly wrong. But I do have one prediction: Brazil will win the soccer World Cup!

You see, Brazilians like soccer, there are a lot of them, and the 2014 World Cup will be held in Brazil. Another forecast: If Brazil doesn't win, maybe Argentina will. Why? Argentina is near Brazil and Argentina even has a player whose name I know.

Unfortunately, people aren't really interested in that kind of prediction because it has already been done, as shown by the odds:

Brazil are the early market leaders in the betting for the 2014 World Cup, for which they are hosts. Current World and European Champions, Argentina are second favourites ahead of Germany and holders Spain. The Netherlands, Italy and England were all handed tough draws and have drifted in the betting as a result, whilst favourable draws for Argentina, Belgium and Colombia saw them all shorten.

Seriously, the home hemisphere advantage appears to be a big deal in the World Cup: South American countries have won all seven World Cups played in the Americas and European countries have won 9 out of 10 World Cups played in Europe. (The two continental powers have split the World Cups played in South Africa and Japan/South Korea.)

December 25, 2013

Joe Weisenthal has a terrific take on the growth of unemployment in the North Pole. As is well known, reindeer unemployment has surged. Yet the Very Serious Elves who promised that sleigh austerity would rapidly bring growth back to the Pole have learned nothing.

But it's not just the elves. Even economists, who should know better, go on insisting that we need to shrink Santa's route now despite high reindeer unemployment. Some continue to insist that there just is a skill mismatch in the Pole economy, so that we have no choice but to allow the diminutive Rudolph resources go unemployed. This truly is the dark age of North Pole economics.Imagine for a moment that the pole suffered from an immense foggy night. Everyone would agree in that case that we could put Rudolph's red nose to good use. I know it drives people crazy when I mention that a crisis can be good for aggregate demand—but everyone who disagrees with me is already crazy, so who cares?

Santa Claus is inflating away the future of Christmas

By Niall Ferguson, Financial Times

In the course of history there have always been those who believed that we could celebrate Christmas in perpetuity. And every time, without fail, the Christmas program has run up against the hard reality of inflation. You just cannot expect that producing all those gifts out of the ether will not diminish the value of all the gifts that have come before and all those that shall come after.

The truth about Christmas and Inflation

By Josh Barro, Business Insider

Niall Ferguson writes: "You just cannot expect that producing all those gifts out of the ether will not diminish the value of all the gifts that have come before and all those that shall come after.

There appears to be a silent rule among pundits—all of whom secretly read me—that we not mention immigration and the North Pole in the same sentence. The truth is that the success of Santa's operation up there demonstrates that the accepted orthodoxy on immigration is 100 percent wrong. For as long as anyone can remember, there's been zero immigration to the North Pole—yet the economy thrives, the elves have a thriving culture and there is very little social strife. All that is supposed to be impossible in a monoculture.

But, of course, you're not supposed to notice these hate-facts.

Open Borders: Why should they stop at Christmas?

By Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

Every year the American government briefly relaxes its stranglehold on our borders to permit the entrance of Santa Claus and his team of reindeer. If this is a good thing on Christmas, imagine how much better it would be if we made this our year round policy? Have you ever eaten in an Elven restaurant? The candy canes are sublime.

While there are some who think that competition with elf workers would impoverish American workers, there is not a lot of evidence to support this. In fact, the toy making of the elves would likely be complimentary to native production. What's more, the wealth generated by elven labor would add to economic growth. ...

The Candy Cane Racket

By Tim Carney, Washington Examiner ...

... As it turns out, Santa's little lobbyists had a hand in writing the Domestic Candy Protection Act of 2010. And the former chief staffer for the Senate Subcommittee on Curved Candy now works for the lobbying firm employed by Santa. ...

Here's what you need to know about this year's big Christmas econ-war

By Joe Weisenthal, Business Insider

[Click to view this 28 page slide show on one page]

Read the whole thing there. Thanks to John Carney of CNBC. By the way, how many Carneys are there?

Are you still making fun of young women for talking like Valley Girls?

Do you assume that because their statements end in a hesitant, rising quaver (“My name is Brittany?”) they are shallow, scattered or uncertain? Even that they sound — how to say this politely? is there any way? — intellectually your inferior?

Is there nuance hidden inside “Valley Girl speak” — and is it used exclusively by women?

Seriously?

For years, sociologists and linguists have studied that lilt, referring to it as “uptalk” or “high-rising intonation.” They found its presence in large pockets throughout the English-speaking world — Australia? England? New Zealand? Some date it to the 1950s, others say it is centuries old.

In America, it became popularized during the 1980s as Valley Girl Speak, presumably inspired by Frank Zappa’s hit 1982 song “Valley Girl,” a derisive reference to the young white women of California’s San Fernando Valley who spoke it as their own dialect.

Sure, the Valley Girls at the new Sherman Oaks Galleria Mall on Ventura Boulevard were white, but they were women (or pre-women) so that means noticing anything about them is ist.

In reality, uptalking, which happened in a lot of places (Minnesota, Canada, Canton, Dixie, etc.), was just one small part of the rich insanity of Valley Girl speech. Let's go to the videotape:

You can just feel the palpable oppression that Valley Girls labored under beneath the lash of patriarchy.

Films like “Heathers” and “Clueless” perpetuated and parodied the stereotype of the speech and its purported lifestyle.

The researchers gave the speakers two tasks: using a map to give directions to a listener, and describing a sitcom clip they had just watched.

Generally, the women did use uptalk almost twice as often as men, with their rises beginning later in a sentence and hitting higher pitches. But even in making a simple, declarative statement such as, “My appointment is at 9 o’clock,” which a non-uptalker (downtalker?) might end with a falling intonation, the men and women in this group used rises with similar frequency.

When giving directions, a non-uptalker would use a declarative sentence, without a rising inflection. But uptalkers did use rises, as if they were implicitly asking the listener to confirm that they were being understood: “Go all the way to the right in the middle where it says Canyon Hills?” Both the men and women in the study used uptalk 100 percent of the time in these so-called “confirming” statements.

Uptalk, the researchers found, could also serve a strategic purpose through a technique known as “floor-holding,” in which the speaker, anticipating an interruption by the listener, tries to stave it off by using a rising tone at the end of a statement. Floor-holding is the vocal equivalent of holding up your palm, as if to say, “Wait, I’m not finished!”

In the study, women spoke with the floor-holding rise nearly 60 percent of the time: “O.K., so go toward Warren” (pronounced as a high-rising “Waa—REN?”). Men used it only 28 percent of the time, tending instead to maintain steady voices, in a plateau. Amalia Arvaniti, a co-author of the study who is now head of the English language and linguistics department at the University of Kent in England, said, “It could indicate that young women were generally interrupted more than men and so it’s a defense mechanism.”

Or it could be that young women like to talk more and thus use strategies to hold the floor. Or it could be that they develop insider lingo to exclude outsiders.

Or maybe it was fun.

Consider two similar sentences. The downtalking version:

I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

That's kind of a conversation stopper.

It's really not all that conducive to either the listeners or the speaker saying anything further, other than maybe, "When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry."

The uptalking version:

I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, you know?

Presumably, the uptalker has lots more to say about himself beyond that incident in Reno, and if he flags, he's expecting his listeners to jump in to encourage him to tell them more with their own uptalking interjections like "Really?"

Here's another good bit to practice uptalking:

I am become Death? The destroyer of worlds, you know?

A commenter notes:

I was raised in the mid-west and moved to Hollywood in 1973 when I was 14 years. A year later I moved to Sylmar, in the San Fernando Valley. I knew kids from all over the valley, and yes, girls there did uptalk different than I'd ever heard before, even in Hollywood. It was much more pervasive among the more affluent neighborhoods in the South Valley like Encino, Tarzana and Woodland Hills, but it crept North, into Granada Hills and Northridge, even into Sylmar which was still somewhat rural at the time.

Yes, that was Moon Unit Zappa's interpretation, too: she was raised in the West Hollywood side of Laurel Canyon. West Hollywood is a densely packed adult playground of rock stars, gays, eccentrics, and culturati (e.g., Stravinsky and Schoenberg lived in West Hollywood for years). In other words, it's not really for kids. But when she ventured north into the suburban San Fernando Valley, she found that the local girls, who dominated Valley culture, uptalked more.

Valley Girl talk doesn't have much to do with patriarchy oppressing women. Instead, it emerged from the huge number of affluent Baby Boomer adolescent females in the San Fernando Valley talking to each other all the time on their Princess phones on the bedroom extension lines that their doting dads paid for.

The San Fernando Valley back then was like that Bedouin village that's so inbred that it has high rates of deafness, and therefore the deaf children had enough other deaf children around to make up their own sign language. The Valley was the same thing (minus the deafness, inbreeding, and camels): if you get enough kids together, they'll develop their own ways of communicating.

By the way, here is the 1953 song "Crescent City Blues" by Gordon Jenkins and sung by Beverly Mahr. (The song follows some scene-setting talk -- it was part of a proto-concept album.) "Crescent City Blues" resembles "Folsom Prison Blues" to the tune of the $75,000 settlement Cash paid Jenkins in the 1970s. But the melodic differences between the two songs -- chiefly in the extreme downtalking that ends Cash's choruses -- are illustrative of male and female personality differences:

... The recent burst of interest in IQ, sparked first by Dominic Cummings (Michael Gove’s adviser), and then by Boris [Johnson], has been encouraging in one sense. As Robert Plomin, probably the world’s leading expert on the genetics of intelligence, put it to me, there used to be a kneejerk reaction along the lines of “you can’t measure intelligence”, or “it couldn’t possibly be genetic”. This time the tone is more like: “Of course, there is some genetic influence on intelligence but . . .”

The evidence from twin studies, adoption studies and even from DNA evidence is relentlessly consistent: in children, in Western society, the heritability of IQ scores is about 50 per cent. The other half comes equally from family (shared environment) and from unshared individual experiences: luck, teachers, friends.

This numerical precision easily misleads us into thinking genes and environment struggle against each other. In fact, they are like two pillars supporting an arch: nature makes you seek out nurture, which brings out your nature. But here is where things get interesting. The acceptance of genetic influence on intelligence leads to some surprising, even paradoxical implications, some of which turn the assumptions of both the Right and the Left upside down.

First, if intelligence was not substantially genetic, there would be no point in widening access to universities, or in grammar schools and bursaries at private schools trying to seek out those from modest backgrounds who have more to offer. If nurture were everything, kids unlucky enough to have been to poor schools would have irredeemably poor minds, which is nonsense. The bitter irony of the nature-nurture wars of the 20th century was that a world where nurture was everything would be horribly more cruel than one where nature allowed people to escape their disadvantages.

The Left, which has championed nurture against nature, is learning to take a different view — over homosexuality, for example, or learning disability, genetic influence is used as an argument for tolerance. A recent Guardian headline criticised Boris by saying “gifted children are failed by the system”, which presupposes the existence of (genetically) gifted children.

The second surprise is that genetic influence increases with age. If you measure the correlation between the IQs of identical twins and compare it with that of adopted siblings, you find the difference grows dramatically as they get older. This is chiefly because families shape the environments of young children, whereas older children and adults select and evoke environments that suit their innate preferences, reinforcing nature.

It follows — the third surprise — that much of what we call the “environment” proves to be itself under genetic influence. Children who are very good at reading are likely to have parents who read a lot, schools that give them special opportunities and friends who recommend books. They create a reading-friendly environment for themselves. The well-documented association between family socio-economic status and IQ, routinely interpreted as an environmental effect, is, writes Professor Plomin and colleagues, “substantially mediated by genetic factors”. Perhaps intelligence is an appetite, at least much as an aptitude, for learning.

The fourth surprise is that the better the economy, education, and welfare are, the more heritable IQ will be. Just as having extra food will make you brighter if you are starving, but not if you are plump, so the same applies to toys, teachers, books and friends. Once you have enough of any of these things, having more will not make as much difference.

Christmas shopping hint: Children tend to disagree that enough is enough when it comes to toys.

So differences due to environment will fade. In a world when some are starving and some are kings, the differences would be mainly environmental. In a world where all went to Balliol, the main difference remaining would be genetic. Social reformers rarely face this fact — the more we equalise opportunity, the more the people who get to the top will be the genetically talented.

For example, English aristocrats like Ridley used to be dramatically taller on the whole than the national average. Not so much anymore. Now height is more genetic.

And this brings a final paradox: a world with perfect social mobility would show very high heritability. The children of Balliol parents would qualify for Balliol disproportionately, having inherited both aptitude and an appetite for evoking the environments that amplified that aptitude. Far from indicating that parents are giving their children unfair environmental advantages, a high correlation between the achievements of parents and offspring suggests that opportunity is being levelled, albeit slowly and patchily. In Professor Plomin’s words: “Heritability can be viewed as an index of meritocratic social mobility.”

Moreover, assortative mating is probably reinforcing the trend. That is to say, 50 years ago, when women were not often allowed near higher education, Professor Branestawm chose to marry the girl next door because she was good at ironing his shirts, whereas today he marries another professor because she writes gorgeous equations about quantum mechanics, and they have children who are professors squared.

We are a long way from equality of opportunity, but when we get there we will not find equality of outcome. Already IQ — for all its flaws as an objective measure of intelligence — is good at predicting not just educational attainment, but income, health and even longevity remarkably well.

Do we reconcile ourselves to inequality, then? No! Just because capability is inherited does not mean it is immutable. Hair colour and short sight are highly heritable, but both can be altered. Education is not just about coaxing native wit from the gifted, but also coaching it into the less gifted.

The greatest trick the intelligent ever pulled was convincing the world intelligence doesn't exist.

The greatest trick the heritably gifted ever pulled was convincing the world that heritability doesn't exist.

One hundred years ago, the concept of noblesse oblige stated that those gifted by inheritance, such as the sons of viscounts, had to occasionally pay for their privileges by, say, leading infantry charges across No Man's Land.

We increasingly live in a world where the heritably clever can get away with much in part because they've propounded an ideology in which thinking clearly about the privileges and responsibilities of the clever is obfuscated with happy talk about equality and two minutes hates about how only racists are so unscientific as to notice heritability and inequality in intelligence.

December 22, 2013

As 2013 comes to an end, I'd like to thank the institutional media for providing me with another year of material that turns itself into parody just by being featured in block quotes on iSteve. But, really, you don't have to make my life this easy:

As Hispanics surpass white Californians in population next year, the state becomes a potential model for the rest of the country, which is going through a slower but similar demographic shift.

But when it comes to how California is educating students of color, many say the state serves as a model of what not to do.

In California, 52 percent of the state's 6 million school children are Hispanic, just 26 percent are white. And Hispanic students in general are getting worse educations than their white peers. Their class sizes are larger, course offerings are fewer and funding is lower.

The consequence is obvious: lower achievement.

Just 33 percent of Hispanic students are proficient in reading in third grade, compared with 64 percent of white students. By high school, one in four Hispanic 10th graders in California cannot pass the high school math exit exam, compared with 1 out of 10 white students.

And while overall test scores across the state have gone up in the past decade, the achievement gap hasn't changed.

... Nationally, an achievement gap is also showing up as Latino enrollment has soared from one out of 20 U.S. students in 1970 to nearly one out of four, and white students account for just 52 percent of U.S. first graders.

"We're falling behind," said Antioch University Los Angeles provost Luis Pedraja. "Ultimately we will face a crisis where a majority of the U.S. population will be economically disadvantaged, which will reduce their spending power and contribution to taxes and Social Security, impacting all segments of society and our country's economic health."

There are many factors contributing to California's educational divide; many Hispanic students are children of Mexican immigrants who did not complete high school and who cannot provide the academic and social support and advocacy of their white counterparts. The state also has a tax system that allows communities to increase local taxes for their schools — thus wealthier communities have wealthier schools.

That's why there is no achievement gap in the giant Los Angeles Unified School District; it's all one huge community.

All too often, black and Latino students are disproportionally taught easier material than white or Asian kids, said Alan A. Aja, who teaches Latino studies at Brooklyn College.

"No one wants to see themselves as racist," Aja said, "but educators have this ingrained belief that black and Latino kids are cognitively inferior and they lower expectations. It's racialized tracking. So if they assume these kids are going to underachieve, if they assume they don't have capacity to tackle hard topics, well, no wonder there's an achievement gap."

The Guardian reports a new triumph in the campaign to make it even harder for aunts and uncles to shop for toys their little nephews and nieces will like:

Meanwhile, the number of shops organising their toy departments into separate sections for boys and girls has fallen by 60% in the past year, following pressure on retailers from shoppers and campaigners, it has been claimed.

The underlying concern is that girls are being pressured into a certain sexualised, submissive and ultra-feminine ideal, one that is based on looks and shopping.

The reason for this development is that we have become much freer and richer. American blogger Steve Sailer has made the point that in the Victorian era when all kids got for Christmas was a tangerine and a lump of coal there wasn’t much opportunity for gendered toys.

The term that Camille Paglia came up with for the common denominator behind what little boys want in toys is "projection." I can recall as a kid finding pretty awesome the motto: "Strategic Air Command: Projecting American Power Worldwide."

Judging from the toys in my old Christmas pictures, I wanted to grow up to be Ramzan Kadyrov.

The Tsarnaevs had come to America thanks largely to Anzor's younger brother Ruslan, who, as the family told it, was a rich and successful lawyer. He lived near Washington, D.C. and for a time was their model in adapting to the new world. I had known little about Ruslan when I was in Cambridge, but now, reporting on the family after the bombing, I learned his story.

When I met him in Washington last summer, he looked the part of the rich uncle. He picked me up in a silver Mercedes and drove me to Off the Record, a bar in the Hay-Adams hotel near the White House, where we talked for three hours.

Ruslan was indeed successful in ways that his older brother wasn't. They grew up in the penurious former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, where Ruslan excelled in school, learned English, landed a white-collar job in the capital of Bishkek, and met and married the daughter of a retired high-ranking CIA officer, who was there advising the government on privatization. Soon he had a U.S. passport and was studying law at Duke University.

CIA, Russian privatization, Hay-Adams hotel kitty-corner from the White House, Chechens ... the full story behind how the Tsarnaevs got to live in America seems like it would pretty interesting if it ever comes out. But, few others find the topic interesting, perhaps because, you see, it might raise questions about who should get into America and who should not, and that's not a conversation we're supposed to be having.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

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